By John Kleefeld This post has been updated to correct some initial errors. A spectre is haunting academia—the spectre of Wikipedia. And while there was a time when all the old powers would have entered into an alliance to exorcise this spectre, a worldwide community of educators is now taking a radically different approach: they’re assigning students the task of editing and writing Wikipedia’s sprawling content, and giving them academic credit for doing so. In the process, they’re turning students from indiscriminate knowledge consumers to savvy knowledge creators. At the same time, they’re building an open-access and up-to-date storehouse of knowledge that, in certain areas, already rivals traditional reference works.…